The bourgeois press, even of the most liberal and
“democratic” trend, needs must point a Black-Hundred moral when
discussing the assassination of the Portuguese adventurer.

Take, for example, the special correspondent of one of Europe’s
best bourgeois-democratic newspapers—the Frankfurter
Zeitung. He begins his story with a semi-humorous account of the way
the flock of correspondents, as if descending on their prey, made a rush
for Lisbon as soon as the sensational news was received. “I shared a
sleeping compartment with a well-known London journalist,” writes
this gentleman, “who began to boast of his experience. He had already
been to Belgrade on the same errand and could consider himself ‘a special
correspondent for cases of regicide’."

Indeed, the happening to the king of Portugal is a truly
“occupational accident” of kings.

Small wonder that we have professional correspondents specialising in the
description of their Majesties’ professional “misadventures”.

But however strong the element of cheap and vulgar sensationalism is
with such correspondents, the truth has a way of asserting itself. “A
merchant residing in the busiest shopping district” told the
Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent the following: “As soon as
I learned what had happened I hung out a mourning flag. But very soon
customers and acquaintances started coming in and asking whether I had gone
out of my mind and was determined to ruin my custom. Do you mean to say
that no one has any feeling of compassion, I asked. My dear sir,
you wouldn’t believe what kind of answers I received! And so
I removed the mourning flag.”

“A people as innately good-natured and friendly as the
Portuguese are, must have gone through a harsh school to learn to hate
so implacably even in the grave. And if this is true—as it
undoubtedly is, and by keeping silent about it I would be distorting
historical truth— if not only such mute demonstrations pronounce
judgement on the crowned victim, if at every turn you hear words of
abuse, even from ‘law-abiding people’, levelled at the victim of
assassination, you naturally find yourself wanting to study the rare
combination of circumstances which has made the psychology of a people
so abnormal. For a people which does not concede to death its ancient
and sacred right of atoning for all earthly sins, must be either morally
degenerate already, or there must exist conditions engendering an
unfathomable feeling of hatred, which clouds the clear eye of fair
judgement.”

O, liberal hypocrites! Why do you not brand as moral degenerates those
French scholars and writers, who even to this day hate and virulently abuse
not only the leading personalities of the 1871 Commune but even t.hose of
1793? Not only the fighters of the proletarian revolution, but even those
of the bourgeois revolution? Because the “democratic” lackeys
of the modern bourgeoisie regard it as “normal” and
“moral” that the people should “good-naturedly”
endure every possible indignity, outrage, and atrocity at the hands of
crowned adventurers.

Otherwise, continues the correspondent (i.e., other wise than as a
result of exceptional conditions), “one could not understand the fact that
already today one monarchist newspaper speaks about innocent victims from
among the people with almost greater sorrow than it does about the king,
and we already see quite clearly how legends are be ginning to form that
will invest the assassins with a halo of glory. Whereas in almost all cases
of assassination the political parties hasten to dissociate themselves from
the assassins, the Portuguese Republicans are frankly proud of the fact
that the ‘martyrs and heroes of February 1st’ came from their ranks...”.

The bourgeois democrat, in his excessive zeal, goes to the length of
being ready to describe as a “revolutionary legend” the respect
which Portuguese citizens pay to the men who sacrificed themselves in order
to remove a king who had made a mockery of the constitution!

The correspondent of another bourgeois newspaper, the Milan
Corriere della Sera, reports the severe censorship imposed in
Portugal after the assassination. Telegrams are not passed. Ministers and
kings are not characterised by that “good nature” which appeals
so strongly to the honest bourgeois in the case of the mass of the people!
In war, as in war—rightly argue the Portuguese adventurers who have
taken the place of the assassinated king. Communication has become almost
as difficult as in war. Reports have to be sent by a roundabout route,
first by post to Paris (perhaps to some private address), and thence
transmitted to Milan. “Not, even in Russia,” writes the
correspondent on February 7, “during the most violent revolutionary
periods, did the censorship clamp down so hard as it now does in Portugal.”

“Some Republican newspapers,” this correspondent reports on
February 9 (New Style), “write today [the day of the king’s
funeral] in terms which I positively dare not repeat in a telegram.”
In a report dated February 8, which arrived after that of the 9th, the
comment of the newspaper Pays on the funeral arrangements is
quoted:

“The mortal remains of two monarchs were borne past—the use
less ashes of a wrecked monarchy, which had been sustained by treachery and
privileges, and whose crimes have smirched two centuries of our history.”

“This is a Republican newspaper, of course,” the
correspondent adds, “but is not the appearance of an article thus
worded on the day of the king’s funeral an eloquent fact?”

For our part, we will merely add that we regret one thing— that
the Republican movement in Portugal did not settle accounts with all the
adventurers in a sufficiently resolute and open manner. We regret that in
the happening to the king of Portugal there is still clearly visible the
element of conspiratorial, i.e., impotent, terror, one that essentially
fails to achieve its purpose and falls short of that genuine, popular,
truly regenerative terror for which the Great French Revolution became
famous. Possibly the republican movement in Portugal will mount still
higher. The sympathy of the socialist proletariat will always he on the
side of the Republicans against the monarchy. But what they have succeeded
in doing so far in Portugal is only to frighten the monarchy by
the assassination of two monarchs, but not to destroy it.

The socialists in all European parliaments have expressed, to the best
of their ability, their sympathy with the Portuguese people and the
Portuguese Republicans, their loathing for the ruling classes, whose
spokesmen condemned the assassination of the adventurer and expressed their
sympathy towards his successors. Some socialists openly declared their
views in parliament, others walked out during the expressions of sympathy
towards the “sufferer”—the monarchy. Vandervelde in the Belgian
parliament chose a “middle” way—the worst way—by
squeezing out of himself a phrase to the effect that he honoured “all
the dead”, meaning both the king and those who had killed him. We
trust that Vandervelde will be a solitary exception among the socialists of
the world.

Republican tradition has weakened considerably among the socialists of
Europe. This is understandable and to some extent justifiable, inasmuch as
the imminence of the socialist revolution diminishes the practical
importance of the struggle for a bourgeois republic. Often,
however, the slackening of republican propaganda signifies, not vigour in
the striving for the complete victory of the proletariat, but a weak
consciousness of the proletariat’s revolutionary aims in general. Not
without reason did Engels, in criticising the Erfurt Draft Programme in
1891, impress upon the German workers with the greatest possible emphasis
the importance of the struggle for a republic, and the possibility of such
a struggle becoming the order of the day in Germany as
well.[1]

With us in Russia the struggle for a republic is a matter of immediate
practical significance. Only the most contemptible petty-bourgeois
opportunists like the Popular Socialists or the “S. D.”
Malishevsky (see Proletary, No. 7, in regard to him) could
draw from the experience of the Russian revolution the conclusion that in
Russia the struggle for the republic is relegated to the background. On the
contrary, the experience of our revolution has proved that the struggle for
the abolition of the monarchy is inseparably bound up in Russia with the
peasants’ struggle for the land,
with the whole people’s struggle for freedom. The experience of our
counter-revolution has shown that a struggle for freedom which does not
affect the monarchy is no struggle at all, but petty-bourgeois cowardice
and flabbiness or down right deception of the people by the careerists of
bourgeois parliamentarism.